On entering school, rural Australian children from Indigenous backgrounds are thrown into an unfamiliar environment, linguistically and culturally, which sets them up for failure. The author, working closely with elders and community in Alice Springs, has drawn on her considerable experience in both Indigenous education and TESOL to address this…

This is a research study conducted on 17 teachers who teach English in Saudi international schools. It mainly aims at exploring teaching practices in these schools in terms of the principles of communicative language teaching (CLT). It also investigates the appropriateness of CLT in this context from the point of view of teachers. Two research…

This article attempts to fill a research gap in the literature where there is no research in the available literature on the general foreign language/foreign-language-for-specific-purposes discontinuity at the secondary/tertiary interface. The article reports on the findings of a study that aimed to acquire the opinions of the teachers of foreign…

The present article reports the findings of a study that explored(1) whether direct written corrective feedback (CF) can help high-proficient L2 learners, who has already achieved a rather high level of accuracy in English, improve in the accurate use of two functions of English articles (the use of "a" for first mention and…

This article reports on a study that was carried out in order to examine the impact of conferencing assessment on students' learning of English grammar. Forty-two Iranian intermediate university students were randomly assigned to an experimental and a control group. The participants in the experimental group took part in four individual and four…

Analyzing errors committed by second language learners during their first year of study at the University of Taif, can offer insights and knowledge of the learners' difficulties in acquiring technical English communication. With reference to the errors analyzed, the researcher found that the learners' failure to understand basic English grammar…

There is growing evidence that the lack of competence of university ESL (English as a second language) students in academic writing affects their overall academic performance. Olivas and Li (2006) connected low second-language proficiency levels in English to poor academic performance of international students studying at both university and…

This dissertation explored the effect of two planning conditions (the multiple planning condition with rehearsal and online planning time, and the single planning condition with online planning time only) on L2 production complexity and accuracy and the subsequent development of these two linguistic areas in the context of written synchronous…

Grounded in literature on the miseducation of students whose native varieties of English differ most noticeably from the standard academic variety (Delpit 2006; Labov 1972a; Rickford 1999; Smitherman 1999; Wolfram, Adger, and Christian 1999; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2006), this dissertation examines the links between the sociolinguistic…

Acquiring sufficient linguistic proficiency to perform competently in academic and professional contexts generally requires substantial study time beyond what most language programs can offer in the classroom. As such, teachers and students alike would benefit considerably from high quality self-access materials promoting independent learning out…

The study examined heritage speaker grammars and to what extent they diverge with respect to grammatical gender from adult L2 learners. Results from a preference task involving code-mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) and code-mixed copula constructions show a difference between these two types of operations. Heritage speakers patterned with the…

The authors of "Phrase-final prepositions in Quebec French: An empirical study of contact, code-switching and resistance to convergence", Poplack, Zentz & Dion (2011, this issue), henceforth cited as PZD, make a strong case for showing that, in spite of surface similarities, preposition stranding in Canadian French relative clauses…

Although thoroughly analysed in adult second language acquisition (L2A), the acquisition of subject properties in child L2A has not received so much attention and the majority of studies deal with longitudinal data or only with a single subject property. This study contributes new cross-sectional data from 5-year-old Spanish children acquiring…

Sixty-five Japanese learners of English participated in the current study, which investigated the acquisitional value of form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) on learners' pronunciation development. All students received a 4-hr FFI treatment designed to encourage them to notice and practice the target feature of…

The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between proactive and reactive Focus on Form (FonF) and gestures. Two English classes in a public high school in Japan taught by a native speaker of English were observed and videotaped for 96 min and analyzed. Overall, 64 proactive FonF and 43 reactive FonF were provided. Among them,…